books.google.com - In the Nevada desert, an experiment has gone horriblywrong. A cloud of nanoparticles -- micro-robots -- has escaped from the laboratory. This cloud is self-sustaining and self-reproducing. It is intelligent and learns from experience. For all practical purposes, it is alive.It has been programmed as...http://books.google.com/books/about/Prey.html?id=oDKNAAAACAAJ&utm_source=gb-gplus-sharePrey

Prey

In the Nevada desert, an experiment has gone horriblywrong. A cloud of nanoparticles -- micro-robots -- has escaped from the laboratory. This cloud is self-sustaining and self-reproducing. It is intelligent and learns from experience. For all practical purposes, it is alive.

It has been programmed as a predator. It is evolvingswiftly, becoming more deadly with each passing hour.

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Review: Prey

User Review - Elar - Goodreads

Idea behind the book is very catching and gives small introduction to machine learning and other IT techniques. But why is the main character intelligent in one moment and dumb as as a doorstop in next?Read full review

Review: Prey

User Review - Gianni - Goodreads

One of his best novels. I'm always amazed at the ability that Michael Crichton possessed of making even the most difficult scientific explanation easy to understand and - more importantly - believe ...Read full review

Popular passages

Page xi - Within fifty to a hundred years a new class of organisms is likely to emerge. These organisms will be artificial in the sense that they will originally be designed by humans. However, they will reproduce, and will evolve into something other than their initial form; they will be alive under any reasonable definition of the word.

Page xv - Sometime in the twenty-first century, our self-deluded recklessness will collide with our growing technological power. One area where this will occur is in the meeting point of nanotechnology, biotechnology, and computer technology. What all three have in common is the ability to release self-replicating entities into the environment.

Page xi - ... organisms, since their reproduction will be under at least partial conscious control, giving it a Lamarckian component. The pace of evolutionary change consequently will be extremely rapid. The advent of artificial life will be the most significant historical event since the emergence of human beings. The impact on humanity and the biosphere could be enormous, larger than the industrial revolution, nuclear weapons, or environmental pollution. We must take steps now to shape the emergence of artificial...

Page 362 - body" is really the combination of all these organ swarms. We think our bodies are solid, but that's only because we can't see what is going on at the cellular level. If you could enlarge the human body, blow it up to a vast size, you would see that it was literally nothing but a swirling mass of cells and atoms, clustered together into smaller swirls of cells and atoms. Who cares? Well, it turns out a lot of processing occurs at the level of the organs. Human behavior is determined in many places....

Page 109 - The human brain is the most complicated structure in the known universe — but as practically nothing of the universe is known, it is probably fairly low in the scale of organic computers. Nevertheless, it contains powers and potentialities still largely untapped, and perhaps unguessed at.

Page xv - We think we know what we are doing. We have always thought so. We never seem to acknowledge that we have been wrong in the past, and so might be wrong in the future. Instead, each generation writes off earlier errors as the result of bad thinking by less able minds — and then confidently embarks on fresh errors of its own.

Page 345 - The hell with it, I thought. I crumpled up the sheet of paper, and tossed it in the wastebasket. However this problem got solved, it wasn't going to be with computer code. That much was clear.

About the author (2003)

Michael Crichton has sold over 200 million books, which have been translated into thirty-eight languages; thirteen of his books have been made into films. Also known as a filmmaker and the creator of ER, he remains the only writer to have had the number one book, movie, and TV show simultaneously. At the time of his death in 2008, Crichton was well into the writing of Micro; Richard Preston was selected to complete the novel.

Richard Preston is the internationally bestselling author of eight books, including The Hot Zone and The Wild Trees. He is a regular contributor to The New Yorker. He lives with his wife and three children near Princeton, New Jersey.